Interesting finds on the shores of the history of science

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Giambattista Vico died in poverty in January 1744, having spent his last pennies on a new edition of the Principi di Scienza Nuova. Outside Naples, nobody cared. No notices appeared in the learned journals; no obituaries were read at royal or local academies. Eighty years later, his work was translated into German and French; in the 1860s, Michelet retrospectively called him “his sole guiding spirit”,[1] and a statue was raised in the Naples public gardens. Anthony Grafton’s foreword to the Penguin edition of the New Science compares it to Newton’s Principia.[2] And so, posthumously, Vico became the founding father he wanted to be. It is a historical Cinderella story too good to be true.

“Guard your children!”[1] was a demand that echoed through multiple Prussian newspapers in 1877 (Depdolla 1939). It was uttered by a very concerned protestant minister who warned parents against the moral state of emergency at Prussian schools. The root of all evil? The incorporation of Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionism into biology classes. Five years later, the Prussian ministry of education banned biology as a whole from the final years of secondary education. No pupil was to learn about evolution in the institutional setting of the classroom.

There will be no posts in the following weeks, since we are on vacation. We will resume our regular schedule next month; if you would like to be notified, please subscribe to our news letter or follow us on Twitter (@ShellsAndPebbles).

For today, instead of publishing a new article, we have brushed up some older ‘shells and pebbles’ from a friendly blog: Ilja Nieuwland, Robert-Jan Wille and Andreas Weber, the authors of naturalhistories.net, are moving their and our favorite posts to ShellsAndPebbles. You can find the first batch of posts (4 in total) below. Have fun!

Door een foutje in de redactiekalender is er vandaag geen artikel. Volgende week gaat Shells&Pebbles weer verder! // Due to a mistake in our schedule, there is no blog update today. We will be back next week!

You are most welcome to visit the new history of science weblog ‘Shells & Pebbles’!

Our first post has been written by Floris Solleveld and is in Dutch: ‘Zeg het met muzen’.
You can leave a reaction at the bottom of the page. Please do not hesitate to react to posts, as we mean Shells & Pebbles to be an accessible platform for exchanging treasures and thoughts.
From today onwards the weblog will be updated every Sunday evening, as to make sure you can start your week with Shells & Pebbles.

We are very glad with the enthusiasm for Shells & Pebbles. We have received many plans for interesting posts already. Do you want to write a post? Please let us know here. We are planning the schedule far ahead, so you can also contact us about a post you want to write during the coming months. If you have no inspiration for writing but would like to receive our monthly emails about the new articles, please sign up here.